Business Intelligence

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What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence uses skills, processes, technologies, practices and applications to support business decision making, and it used to analyse mostly internal, structured data and business processes. Alongside Business Intelligence, competitive intelligence gathers, analyses and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors.

Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions build on your existing technology investments so that your employees can gain access to up-to-date information for more relevant decision-making. Microsoft's Business Intelligence solutions integrate key technologies on a single platform that empowers informed decision making that enables your business to move forward.

SharePoint 2013 includes new Business Intelligence capabilites, including rich scorecards, dynamic dashboards, and easy-to-use Chart Web parts, that give people more flexibility when working with data to make business decisions. Using these capabilites, people can turn raw data into usable reports without involving developers or server administrators in the process. They can increase their productivity and make prompt, informed decisions using the familiar user interface in SharePoint 2013.

How can ICS Solutions help?

ICS Solutions Business Intelligence solutions focus on helping organisations make better decisions. Our functional and flexible solutions provide the information that your employees need in a format that suits their specific context.

Personal Business Intelligence solutions provide users with the tools they require, specific to their focus area, to support and their decision making.

Team based solutions help teams share Business Intelligence - helping them to efficiently and effectively reach collaborative decisions.

Organisational Business Intelligence solutions provide the means to measure success and coordinate efforts across your enterprise.

Why invest in SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence?

Excel Services: Increasingly people use Microsoft Excel to store and analyse data. As the use of Excel has increased, so has the need to share results with colleagues and customers. In SharePoint 2013, Increased fidelity to the experience in Excel. Excel Services for SharePoint 2013 supports additional Excel features and improves performance.

Visio Services: SharePoint 2013 now includes Visio Services, letting people render Visio diagrams and charts within a browser. SharePoint 2013 treats Visio files as first-class document types - i.e. Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, so people can easily open a Visio diagram from a document library.

Chart Web Parts: As people increasingly manage information through SharePoint, they must be able to visualise and share information to help decision makers base their choices on relevant and up-to-date data. Users are able to use wizards to add Chart Web Parts to SharePoint Web pages to visually represent the data.

PerformancePoint Services: Almost every Business Intelligence implementation uses scorecards and dashboards. Scorecards are collections of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and objectives that people use to measure multiple performance factors in a business. PerformancePoint services is now integrated tightly with, and included as part of SharePoint 2013. Because PerformancePoint Services is no longer a stand-alone product users can quickly assemble dashboards using the data sources available across SharePoint, Office and SQL Server for reporting, analytics, scorecards and dynamic dashboards.

Find out more about Business Intelligence solutions at our next SharePoint 2013 seminar.